102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn Read Free Book Online Page B

gone.”
    “Get to the front door. See if there is smoke there,” Eugene told him.
    Eugene heard his brother put down the phone, then followed thesounds drifting into his ear. Yelling. Commotion, but not panic. Damian reported back a moment or two later. Yes, there was smoke.
    “Get to the stairs,” Eugene said. “See where the smoke is coming from. Go the other way.”
    Damian did not linger. “We’ve got to go,” Eugene heard his brother say. Or maybe, “We’re going.” Whatever he said, none of the seventy people on the 92nd floor had access to an open staircase.
     
     
    Garth Feeney did not work in the trade center but had gone there to attend the Risk Waters breakfast at Windows on the World. He phoned his mother, Judy, in Florida, who was just watching the first broadcasts about the crash.
    “Hi, what’s new?” she said, when she heard her son’s voice.
    “Mom, I’m not calling to chat,” Feeney said. “I’m in the World Trade Center and it’s been hit by a plane.”
    “Please tell me you are below it,” his mother said.
    “No, I’m above it. I’m on the top floor,” he said. “There are seventy of us in one room. They have closed the doors and they are trying to keep the smoke out.”
    The building had barely stopped shuddering when smoke first appeared in Windows on the World, so thick and noxious that one man told his wife a bomb had gone off in the bathroom. Actually, the restaurant was well above the impact zone in the north tower: The fuselage of Flight 11 had entered between the 95th and 97th floors, and the tip of its right wing—the highest point of impact because the aircraft had banked—cut into the 99th floor. That was still seven stories, about eighty-five feet, beneath the restaurant. As easily as the roaring jet had knifed through the steel face of the tower, smoke now relentlessly, swiftly, seeped into the top of the building, finding paths through and around the concrete floors, emerging in billowing, ghastly clouds. Doris Eng, who had spent the first part of the morning welcoming people to the 106th and 107th floors, now was trying to figure out how to save their lives. In the restaurant were 170 men and women—diners, restaurantworkers, and people attending the breakfast conference sponsored by Risk Waters. She kept calling emergency numbers, unsure where the damage was, but that almost did not matter. People in the restaurant could barely see or breathe.
    In theory, any one of the floors between Windows on the World and the crash site should have stopped the spread of the fire and smoke. Each floor was designed as a fire-tight compartment able to contain a surge of flames and smoke, just as the hull of an ocean liner is divided into multiple chambers, so that if the ship springs a leak, the water will be trapped in a single chamber, blocked from flooding the entire hull and sinking the ship. In a thousand voices, the word came loud and clear that fire containment was not working. During the first ten minutes after the crash, the 911 system would log some 3,000 calls, many of them from people on the upper floors of the north tower. They would report the explosion, and that the stairs were cut off—destroyed outright, or blocked with rubble, or filled with smoke or fire. Downstairs, at the Port Authority police command desk for the trade center, the phone never stopped ringing. Officer Steve Maggett answered one of the lines, and heard from Christine Olender at Windows on the World.
    “Hi, this is Christine, assistant GM of Windows. We’re getting no direction up here. We’re having a smoke condition.”
    Only a few minutes before, she had been chatting on the phone with her mother in Chicago to plan her parents’ visit. Now she was trying to organize an escape.
    “We have most people on the 106th floor; the 107th floor is way too smoky,” she continued. “We need direction as to where we need to direct our guests and our employees, as soon as